How Influencer Marketing Can Help You Generate Sales
Influencer Marketing can help you achieve wide-ranging goals, from boosting brand awareness to strengthening long-term engagement and customer loyalty. As part of a relationship-focused strategy, you can also use influencers to increase your product revenues, directly affecting your bottom line. Whether you’re running an end-of-season push or introducing new products, here are four ways to generate sales using Influencer Marketing:
Embrace Micro-Influencers
Studies show that micro-influencers have stronger engagement and inspire more action from their followers than bloggers with larger audiences. In fact, influencers with fewer than 10,000 followers have 3.5 times more engagement than influencers with 1 million followers. This means that gifting a dozen or more micro-influencers with your target product may yield better results than engaging a single influencer, even if your total reach is ultimately the same. To make this strategy work for you, identify your top geographic markets for your product and select a strong micro-influencer in each. This will not only expand your reach, but it will also help you gauge which markets perform best for different types of product. The tradeoff, of course, is that managing a single influencer requires less effort than managing many, so it’s important to factor in your resources when determining the optimal number of influencers for you.
Utilize Affiliate Links
Affiliate links are a simple and effective ways to drive eCommerce sales by directly rewarding influencers for contributing to sales of your product. Affiliate links also help you track the immediate success of your collaboration by showing you how many followers made a purchase from the collaboration alone. Keep in mind, however, that affiliate links only tell one part of the story. The data doesn’t include in-store purchases inspired by social media posts or direct eCommerce sales made through a different website after seeing an influencer’s content. Utilizing affiliate links as one part of a broader campaign, however, can be a powerful way to inspire short-term product sales.
Know Your Shopping Holidays
Understanding the calendar holidays and events that affect your consumers’ behavior can help guide your sales-driven collaborations by driving immediate interest. Running a collaboration for Mother’s Day gifts or back-to-school outfits, for example, gives your consumers a specific, time-sensitive reason to buy. Any time you’re planning a sales-themed collaboration, think about how you can position your target product as part of a retail holiday.
Take a Multi-Channel Approach
As with any sales-focused campaign, most customers need to see a product at least three times before deciding to buy. Running a multi-channel campaign, with content across an influencer’s blog, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms, gives you a chance to reach their audience multiple times. For the greatest impact, have your influencer publish over the course of a week rather than all at once to give more viewers a chance to see your content. To best track your campaign, you can incorporate affiliate links across each channel.
These are just a few ways to improve your sales-driven influencer collaborations, but it’s important to remember that Influencer Marketing is a relationship-driven strategy. Collaborations ultimately work best when you’ve built a sense of trust and familiarity with influencers who share your brand values and align closely with your audience, and can use shorter-term, sales-driven campaigns as part of a long-term strategy.